Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
The Liberty Ships of World War II were an engineering and industrial
solution to a specific military and political problem. The problem was
that is was necessary to build merchant ships faster than the German
Navy submarines could sink them, in order to supply the United
Kingdom and sustain its war effort. The problem was complicated by
the fact that the Great Depression had greatly
reduced U.S. shipbuilding capacity.
One of the best known Liberty Ship failures was the ? ? ? .
Although this wasn·t the first cargo ship failure, it was highly visible, as
the first ship built in the new yard. In March, another tanker, the
, split in half while entering New York harbor. In January
1943, about 20 ship failures occurred, with 4 or 5 suffering Class I
damage or total hull failure like the ? . Twenty Class I
failures occurred in January 1944, with 120 failures in the following
March. Many failures occurred in the open ocean. Since
the ? and
failures occurred in port, the
ships could be put in drydock, repaired, and put back into service
(Tassava 2003, pp. 88 ² 90).
The gunwale bars and the other retrofits were successful. No ship with gunwale
bars ever failed in service. Through the end of the war, only 127 of the
4,694 Liberty ships and T2 tankers ever suffered a Class I fracture, and no ships
with anti-fracture devices failed. Two years after the war ´an official board of
investigation determined that faulty workmanship caused exactly 25 % of the
2,504 fractures which had occurred up to August 1, 1945, that a combination of
inferior workmanship and inadequate design caused another 20 %, and design
so poor that ¶perfect workmanship would have done little to prevent the
failures· caused a stunning 55 %µ (Tassava 2003, p. 103).